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Last year me and the guy I unload the truck with got hired to strip and wax some floors someone in an office building. While they lost the contract to someone who underbid them. Well the ones that did the underbidding tried to wax the floors and waxed a calendar to the floor.

...I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me.
You cannot run away from the truth, the world is not big enough. DI Jack Frost
Don't Panic THGTTGGreat spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Einstein http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

My wife suffers occasionally from Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, which is caused by a little mineral fragment drifting around in the semicircular canals. You can cure it with something called the Epley Manoeuvre, but first of all you need to establish which side is affected, using the Dix-Hallpike Test. (There's a one-minute YouTube video of the test here , if you want to see the rather dramatic manoeuvre involved.) Basically, you have to whack someone quickly from a sitting position to a horizontal position with their head dangling backwards, while supporting their head and observing their eyes.
So that's what we were doing this morning. Unfortunately, I also have a (different) labyrinthine problem that makes me dizzy if I move my head quickly - so I dropped my wife into the horizontal position on the couch, bending forward as she went, and then continued head-first on to the floor myself. She took this in her stride, and while lying on the floor I could hear her intoning: "I'm fine. Still fine. You OK?" Test positive in the tester, negative in the testee.

I had it a few years ago. Usually just as I went to put my head back to rest on the pillow, or when I went to get up out of bed. Occasionally happened if I looked up above my head level - hence the "top shelf syndrome" name. Luckily, it went away by itself over a few weeks and hasn't recurred in about 7 years - obviously it will now happen again tonight

Things that amaze me:
I got this socket set for my birthday in 1997, shortly after we got our vacation home (now permanent home) in Port Townsend. I've used it a LOT! Every single piece is still there! (Although one or two of the little screwdriver bits may not be original.) If you knew me, you'd know I do tend to lose things.

Note that I do NOT take this set out to the field for hurling events. I have other ones for that.

Ugh, my mother had that. The little mineral fragments are called "otoliths", or ear-stones. I liked to tell her she had rocks in her head.

Of course we all have the same rocks in our heads - they're how we sense which way is up. It's only when an otolith breaks free of its sensory attachment and starts to drift around that it causes problems.

Kym used Facebook, Match.com, and her high school reunion to look for a home for Francesca. She found one in Ohio. An adoption was arranged. One possible problem arose, Francesca tested positive for heart worms.

When my wife went to the shelter a few years ago, we'd "decided" on a particular pup. When we got there, we were told she was gone, because of heart worms. We were shocked. We ended up with her litter mate instead, a male.

In the course of doing the paper work, we found out it had been a heart murmur.

Re-listening to a podcast because last night I thought they said a drink included elf DNA, I knew was tired at that point.

...I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me.
You cannot run away from the truth, the world is not big enough. DI Jack Frost
Don't Panic THGTTGGreat spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Einstein http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

Backing up images and personal things on laptop before trying install ubuntu and amused on how many pictures there are.

...I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me.
You cannot run away from the truth, the world is not big enough. DI Jack Frost
Don't Panic THGTTGGreat spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Einstein http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

Went in this morning for having things taken out and new stuff put in--lab work and a flu shot. Especially amused by the fact that one of the tests I got was a cheek swab. There is now DNA testing that tells you what medication you're likely to respond to for a wide range of conditions, including--most importantly for me--bipolar disorder and chronic pain.

_____________________________________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

There once was a train wreck near Richmond, VA, in which the crew did not have a proper manifest to identify the contents of an overturned tank car. A hazmat team sealed off the site until the manifest was belatedly found, showing that the car was full of innocuous vegetable oil.

I was amused by a case in which a friend's father, a retired FBI forensic chemist, encountered a fresh Ph.D. chemist who was having trouble making sense of some unidentified white powder, which he thought might be heroin or cocaine. The old man examined it under a microscope and then tasted it. He said, "Just what I expected. Milk sugar."

When I was in college, we'd had to borrow my baking powder tin to pour meat drippings into, as it was relatively heat resistant and disposable. Which meant vacating the baking powder into a baggie, what we referred to in my household that year as "the baggie of mysterious white powder."

_____________________________________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

An item on the national news tonight, about scientists flying an aircraft loaded with sensors over Iceland's volcanoes, in an attempt to detect early if one of them is going to undergo a major eruption, of the sort that disrupts North Atlantic air traffic.
So there was a lot of archive footage of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 - which the reporter and newsreader consistently referred to as just "this volcano". I bet if it had been called "Bob" they'd have used its name!

Relatively speaking. The eye(ish) passed over our town and neighborhood with that one. But Gloria did more damage, I think because it lasted longer. It may have been different over Long Island, of course (I was in SE Mass).

CJSF

"A scientific theory
Isn't just a hunch or guess
It's more like a question
That's been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts
The proof is with science
The truth is with science"-They Might Be Giants, "Science Is Real"lonelybirder.org

Murray plays Bob Wiley, a psychiatric patient who follows his egotistical psychiatrist Dr. Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss) on vacation. When the unstable Bob befriends the other members of Marvin's family, it pushes the doctor over the edge.

On a slightly different tack, Simon has gotten very into "presents" in the last day or two, since we saw an episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood where Daniel makes presents for his parents. Simon's version, however, is wrapping up random things already lying around the house. This morning, there was a present by my bed; I went to sleep before he did, as I was exhausted and he doesn't have school today. He's given me the remote to the living room TV!

_____________________________________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

On a slightly different tack, Simon has gotten very into "presents" in the last day or two, since we saw an episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood where Daniel makes presents for his parents. Simon's version, however, is wrapping up random things already lying around the house. This morning, there was a present by my bed; I went to sleep before he did, as I was exhausted and he doesn't have school today. He's given me the remote to the living room TV!

An article in the NY Times has announced that the U.S. Boy Scouts will now accept girls as members. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/u...T.nav=top-news. I was surprised at how "late" this has occurred. My daughter, then 12/13, left the Girl Guides in 1994 and joined the Scouts.

She basically enjoyed the rough and tumble of the Scouts compared to the way the Guides then operated - I am sure that has changed. She was in the first group of girls to join our local Sea scouts group, other groups had allowed girls to join earlier. She went through all the various scouting levels and ended up being a Cub Scout leader. She was "booted out" of scouts as a Rover at the maximum age of 25, but still helped organise jamborees etc until she had her first child. Naturally, her partner is someone she meet during her, adult, scouting activities. She had great fun and as she got older was doing thing such as sailing small catamarans and skiffs to Rottnest Island ( Dutch named) about 20 km offshore and going on multiple day bush-walks and bush track biking.

I generally get along with most people but some people think they call you stupid, arrogant and make up things about you and you should want to hangout with them. I am also the type who have made friends of people teased me after we have made up.

...I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me.
You cannot run away from the truth, the world is not big enough. DI Jack Frost
Don't Panic THGTTGGreat spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Einstein http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

An article in the NY Times has announced that the U.S. Boy Scouts will now accept girls as members. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/u...T.nav=top-news. I was surprised at how "late" this has occurred. My daughter, then 12/13, left the Girl Guides in 1994 and joined the Scouts.

I'm amused to learn that the Scout movement still exists.
My father made me join the Cub Scouts because he thought it would be "good for me" (he was always coming up with ideas that would be "good for me"), and I duly attended, miserably, until I sustained a head injury during some particularly rough "rough and tumble". I was sent back next week, as if being rendered unconscious was all part of the fun. They organized the same game again, I refused to participate, they told me I couldn't be a Cub Scout if I didn't join in, I said that was fine by me and walked home alone in the dark - first time I ever did that. (As my elder brother dryly remarked, that should have earned me a "pathfinder" badge.)
Anyway, that's far from being everyone's experience. However, it used to be I ran into Scouts walking and camping in the Scottish Highlands quite frequently, but I haven't seen any for years. I'd assumed times had changed and the movement had died a death. But it only now occurs to me that that was probably based on my own unconscious feelings about the Scout movement, rather than any reasoned conclusion.

I generally get along with most people but some people think they call you stupid, arrogant and make up things about you and you should want to hangout with them. I am also the type who have made friends of people teased me after we have made up.

So they're right then? I am having trouble parsing your sentence.

CJSF

"A scientific theory
Isn't just a hunch or guess
It's more like a question
That's been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts
The proof is with science
The truth is with science"-They Might Be Giants, "Science Is Real"lonelybirder.org